Online resources
have been made possible at this site as a result of the Multilingual applications
that can be deployed from a web server. Systems Development Lab., IIT Madras
is pleased to offer several resources for the benefit of the viewers. These
are classified into groups based on the nature of the information served
or service provided.

Learning Resources

References

Online Databases

Online services

online demos

Tutorials, quizzes

Linguistic resources

Learning
Resources

Learn
Sanskrit, our popular presentation on Learning Sanskrit through self
study. The online lessons have won appreciation from the world community
not only for their simplicity and effectiveness but the unique manner in
which the lessons are presented in Devanagari script. The lessons have
remained popular from 1997 when the first few lessons were put up. The
lessons have been revised in 2006.

Akshara Animation
refers to learning the stroking order for the aksharas in different scripts.
This is a unique presentation through Java Applets. Please use the links
on the right to reach the appropriate pages.

Braille
Related information has been included from 2001 to allow sighted persons
become familiar with the principles of English Braille as well as Bharati
Braille, the standard followed in India. The pages disseminating information
relating to Braille also serve as useful tutorials.

The quizzes
relating to Learning Sanskrit
and
Braille are one of a kind on
the web.

References

Online references
relate to text from the scriptures and ancient literary works in Sanskrit
and Tamil, two very old languages of India. The presentations include word
by word meanings and translations in English. Search facilities are provided
for searching through the texts. Included here are the Bhagavadgita,
Upanishads, Tolkappiam and Tiukkural.

The pages relating
to the scripts of India present detailed information on the scripts and
the writing systems employed for each script.

The online Sanskrit
Dictionary is another unique presentation with search features and
results returned in Devanagari script.

Searchable online databases containing useful reference data. Indian Postal
code data is presented as also Audio Book information for the Visually
handicapped.

Online
Services

Online services include useful resources for people where multilingual
documents are generated and distributed through web interfaces. these include
transliteration based services, generation of test documents in Unicode,
Braille Transcription for the benefit of the Visually Handicapped. The
Multilingual Software allows effortless creation of E-Books
in different Indian languages that can have multilingual content as also
English.

The demos constitute applications that illustrate the strength of the IITM
approach to multilingual computing on the web. These demos show the capabilities
of the applications which are based on the syllable level coding employed
for representing text in a uniform manner across the scripts. The demos
clearly establish the viability of multilingual computing and localization
of applications. The text to speech features are also illustrated in the
demo pages.

Notable among the demos are the Akshara Animation page and the Search Engine
application. Examples are shown for searches in the text of Bhagavadgita
or Tirukkural

The demo on
online text to speech synthesis shows how speech can be synthesized using
MBROLA. Speech synthesis is illustrated for Sanskrit
as well as Tamil.

Unicode
Test Pages

The main strength of
the Multilingual Software developed at the lab is the approach to working
with Indian languages at the level of syllables. This approach results
in very efficient representation of text in terms of fixed length codes
for syllables which can also be quickly converted to other representations
such as Unicode or ISCII. The service
provided here allows one to submit text in any of the scripts and get
a web page containing Unicode representation of the text.

This service allows
one to include Indian language text in any web page by displaying the text
in the form of an image. This way, one can display text without the need
to install additional software or fonts in the systems. The service allows
text to be submitted in transliterated form and the result returned as
an image. This service will be useful for those who wish to include
Indian language text strings in a web page that is predominantly in English.
The line below is an example of how this service works.

Useful tutorials
have been included at this site. As mentioned earlier in the page, the
tutorials have been prepared to provide the details required to understand
the writing systems used in India as well as the concepts in Braille. The computer science related tutorials relate to
the operation of the 8086 CPU as well as the concepts in Virtual memory.
Basic information relating to the tutorials is
available in the linked page.

Linguistic
references

The pages relating to Linguistics provide information on linguistic corpora
that have been generated for analysis. Useful information is also included
on word structures that exhibit amazing geometrical patterns of akshara
symmetry including very long palindromes!

The pages on "Computing With Tamil"
contain useful information on aspects of Tamil Computing that will be interest
to application developers.